watching bow rescue

Yesterday I spent the afternoon teaching a rescues class with Justine & Barry. It’s interesting to see the different view points. Here in the Midwest, basic rescues are wrapped up around the paddlefloat & T rescues. I’m sure this came from an atmosphere where there are small lakes and ponds in nearly every square mile. Paddlers generally find themselves in calm warm conditions and are rarely in a desperate hurry to get back in their boats. Of course on the Great Lakes and the open ocean the idea of spending time dangling in the water while you blow up a paddle float seems almost silly. A discussion coaches have all the time with very mixed opinions. Personally I’m not a fan of the paddlefloat recovery. I feel that there are almost always better ways to get back in your boat. This is where people who talk down rolling do folks a real disservice. Alone in conditions that put you over, rolling your kayak is the quickest, safest way to survive. Just the act of coming out of your boat will usually increase your risk.

dead weight

A cowboy recovery or re-entry roll are the first things that come to mind when I think about coming out of your boat. Depending on conditions either is fast and effective. Most paddlers can quickly do one or the other in less time than it takes to get a paddlefloat off the deck. Still though, I do tend to carry a paddlefloat with the thought that it’s always nice to have this little “aid” around even if I’m not exacty sure what I would do with it!

stabilizing. . . or just hanging out. .

When put in the position of helping someone recover in anything other than a warm pond time again is of the essence. The last thing we want to do is leave someone floating in the water. From this standpoint a bow rescue becomes much more important. If someone goes over and can’t roll for whatever reason, a bow rescue is a quick solution that keeps them in the cockpit. The trick is making sure that paddlers learn to hang out in their kayaks early on in their learning experiences. Teaching them to only come out of the boat as a last resort is a good focus point.

getting scooped . . .

Sometimes though people do come out of their kayaks. For the sake of speed you can often just forgo the “T” in the T rescue and just scoop the paddler back into their kayak. If you have the luxury of time then the T rescue is the standard.

justine teaching a “T”

In our class we talked a bit about bringing paddlers between the boats which has been sort of hip recently. The first time I started hearing about this I was a little dubious. The idea of having someone fooling around between the boats sounds a bit dangerous to me. It was good to hear Barry point out the downsides of this method so I knew I was not alone in questioning it. A head between two loaded boats bouncing in an rough sea brings to mind the image of a walnut in a nutcracker. Yikes!